Vlad Vexler
Political Analyst & YouTube CreatorPhilosopher and political analyst Vlad Vexler outlines five key tips for how politicians can engage with voters who have already lost trust in them. The discussion explores practical approaches to rebuilding credibility, fostering meaningful dialogue, and restoring public confidence.
In a crisis of trust, a screen comes down between politicians and voters. The screen feels opaque to both sides. Politicians feel that when they do a good job, they can’t get their message across. Voters feel that politics is increasingly unintelligible, like a spectacle of several sports mixed into one. Rackets, bats, and balls are flying about, but the point of the activity and the roles of the actors involved, seem opaque. The sense of opacity compounds other kinds of distrust: feeling unsafe, powerless, and betrayed.
This context means we have to reframe an old political question for our age. Instead of asking “How should politicians speak to voters to keep trust?”, we need to ask, “How should politicians speak to voters whose trust they have already lost?” I propose to give some practical tips in answer to this question. I don’t intend them as solutions, but rather reminders of what politicians already know but are inclined to forget.
Change is Real
This is hard for everybody. It is important to admit, both for citizens and politicians, that difficult historical circumstances generate fear and, consequently, the desire to deny reality – as though our historical circumstances could be wished away. This is why much technocratic politics sounds as though we are in 1998, not 2026.
This takes us to the first tip for politicians in our age: admit the crisis of trust without condescending to citizens. There is an evasive tendency to think that the crisis of trust boils down to three sources: misinformation, moral failure, and malign interference by Russia or our other enemies. The message this sends to citizens is that they have lost trust because they are irrational. But this view is itself an irrational form of misinformation.
Just as we don’t blame a swimmer for losing confidence in rough waters, we shouldn’t blame citizens for losing trust when social conditions make trust hard to sustain. Our democracies are actually coming out of the bay and heading into open water. Citizens are not imagining this. Social conditions such as profound inequality, the disinhibiting state of the Internet, the untethering of social bonds, and hyper-identity politics create low trust societies. The underlying cause of distrust is social reality, not false views about social reality. We need to speak to citizens without inappropriately normalising the conditions they face.
Consent of the Governed
This takes us to the second tip for politicians in our age: prioritise democratic consent over technocratic decision-making. Technocracy asks citizens to endorse the decisions of experts rather than grant their consent to individual decisions. In high-trust, low-polarisation societies, this can work well. In low-trust, high-polarisation societies, it leads to further erosion of confidence in politics and public institutions.
In practice, this means reversing the order of priority between policymaking and civic consent. Let’s take immigration as an example. The tendency has been to take in lots of people into one’s country and then try to persuade voters that the policy is based on sound economic and political considerations. This needs to be reversed. We have to start with what citizens feel on the doorstep. This doesn’t mean pandering to them. It means engaging and persuading them first and passing policy second. If we keep accumulating policies that do not have civic consent, we will lose our democracy.
Tactful Representatives
This takes us to the third tip for politicians in our age: be sensitive about how you tell citizens that you have decided against them. Deciding against them doesn’t mean that they are wrong. It just means that they lost. This has two benefits. First, you respect the values on the basis of which they opposed your policy. You give them credit for their commitment being more than just a whim or a desire. Second, you give them faith that in a democratic society, the conflict may be re-legislated, and they could win next time round. This pluralistic attitude, which admits that sound policy decisions contain some wrong, is powerful in diffusing resentment.
Don’t Be Your Enemy’s Enemy
On the fourth tip for politicians in our age: treat those who treat you as enemies as opponents, not enemies. When a politician who wants to use democracy to subvert democracy calls you an enemy of Britain, you should not call them an enemy of Britain in response. This is one of the paradoxes of democratic politics today. The instinct is to reciprocate in kind. But this hands your irresponsible opponent a victory. Their goal is to subvert democracy, and you joining the politics of enemies, which is the enemy of democracy, helps them do so. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance, when the opponent threatens violence.
For the fifth tip for politicians in our age: treat voters as though they contain multitudes within them. Politics today makes politicians feel assailed. A natural response is to take a defensive rather than a proactive stance. Technocratic politicians feel the paralysing fear of passing power to authoritarian populists. This defensive stance undermines their ability to see voters they don’t agree with three-dimensionally.
Fortune Favours the Bold
This is about confidence – the confidence to see that there may be eight dimensions to a voter’s political position, with only two or three of them expressed at a particular time. A politician has to be able to engage with the other five or six and bring them out.
All these tips reflect the conviction that participatory democracy is a remarkable human achievement. At a historical moment when this achievement feels fragile, and dark clouds are circling, it feels natural to avoid rocking the boat. But passivity reproduces the very conditions that led to our crisis of trust in the first place. Practising politics, as Aristotle understood it, is something best done boldly, with all of our character, judgement, and powers of persuasion on board.